With increasing population, evolving migration patterns, and climate change, large parts of the world are expected to experience water shortages over next few decades. New technologies that reduce water usage will have a profound impact on alleviating water scarcity. One particular area of interest is water dissipated and lost to the atmosphere during electricity generation. For electricity generation in electrical power plants, large amounts of latent heat carried by low temperature steam from turbine exhausts needs to be removed and condensed into water for completion of the Rankine cycle. Typically, low temperature latent heat is removed by the use of large amounts of cooling water, usually supplied from cooling water towers. However, this “wet-cooling method” consumes very large amounts of water.
In contrast to wet-cooling methods and systems, “dry-cooling” methods and systems directly dissipate the latent heat from steam into ambient air without using a lot of water. However, with currently available technology, power producers have not embraced the use of dry-cooling methods and systems because of both high operating costs and thermodynamic limitations on performance when ambient temperatures are high.
Therefore, there remains a pressing need to improve the efficiency and power output of power plants based on Rankine cycles, particularly those utilizing dry-cooling methods and systems.